AutoCAD shows Hebrew as English letters

Where it comes from

In this family of old Hebrew fonts, the lowercase English letters were replaced by the shapes of Hebrew letters. The drafter pressed the key for ח, AutoCAD stored the j on that key, and the font drew it as ח. On screen everything looked right, but the file holds English letters.

When the drawing opens on a computer without the font, AutoCAD draws it in an ordinary font and you see what is really stored. Autodesk describes exactly this in its article on the font GIL.SHX, "written in English instead of Hebrew".

This is the most common kind we found: 6,390 labels in real client drawings. The fonts that carried them were mostly miryl, mirym, sivan_m and techno_m, with gil, mgil, michal_m and moran_m beside them. A font's name is only a hint, since several different fonts share one name. The directory of old Hebrew fonts lists what each one did.

How to read a label like this

Look up each English letter and replace it with the Hebrew one:

Watch the punctuation: a comma in the label is ת and a full stop is ץ. So nrpx, is מרפסת ("balcony") and nsrdu, is מדרגות ("stairs"). A slash / stands for a full stop, and q for a slash.

In some drawings the letters are also in reverse order, because that is how they had to be typed for the font to draw the word correctly. If a decoded word comes out backwards, read it from the end.

What to do

If you only need to read the drawing, the table is enough. If it has to look right on screen, get the original font file from whoever sent it and put it in the drawing's folder. The guide to Hebrew fonts in AutoCAD explains how, and why that hides the damage without fixing it.

If you need to work on the drawing, pass it on or move it to an ordinary font, the English letters in the file have to become Hebrew letters. By hand that means one label at a time, and one drawing we tested had 4,562 broken labels.

Gibberish's repair does it for the whole drawing at once. It tells Hebrew typed as keys apart from real English words using a model of which Hebrew letters follow which, translates the keys into letters, and leaves each label exactly where it was. The plugin that runs it from inside AutoCAD is coming soon. Join the waiting list and we'll let you know when you can download it. You can already check a whole drawing for free and see some of its labels before and after the repair, or decode single labels.